


Four things that never happened to Kara Zor-El (and one that might have)

by endeni



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blanket Permission, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Female Character, Podfic Available, Podfic Welcome, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-18 01:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5892367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endeni/pseuds/endeni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four AU scenarios. And one that may not be so AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four things that never happened to Kara Zor-El...

**I. Kara's pod doesn't get stuck in the Phantom Zone**

With shaking hands, Kara climbs out of the cockpit. She landed on a field of some sort, rich vegetation coming up to her shoulders. On the horizon, she can see a line of smoke rising into the strange alien blue sky.  
“Kal!” she calls and runs towards the smoke. Runs until she reaches the other ship, lying broken on the ground. And two aliens trying to extract her cousin from it.  
“Step away,” she warns them, in Kryptonian.  
They turn towards her, a look of what seems like shock on their faces.  
Kara points to her chest, to the family crest embedded on her tunic, and then to her cousin.  
“Mine”, she cries. “Mine, give him back!”  
She doesn't know what she'll do if they don't comply but she's prepared to use her teeth and her nails.  
  
Slowly, with care, the woman lowers the baby to the ground.  
Kal sees Kara and babbles excited, tries to toddle towards her.  
Kara steps forward, kneels on the ground and gathers him in his arms.  
Little Kal, who's her mission and the only family she has left.  
_Safe_ she tells herself. He's safe.  
“Stand back!” she says looking up, tears in her eyes.  
  
The aliens can't understand her but they remain where they are all the same.  
Trying not to spook her, some parts of her thinks.

Haltingly, the woman crouches down in front of her. She points to herself and, enunciating carefully each sounds, says “M-a-r-t-h-a”.  
Her name.  
The woman smiles encouragingly.  
Reluctantly, Kara touches her chest in turn. “Kara.”  
Her mother raised her to be polite. And Kara is determined to honor her memory. Even now, even here.  
Especially here.  
Soon the man is crouching down too, sharing his name with a sweet smile.

They stay like that for a while, three people hunched down in the middle of a golden field.  
  
Then, some stilted negotiation, conducted through painful exaggerated gestures and facial expressions.  
They can't mean us harm, Kara thinks. Surely they wouldn't subject themselves to this ridiculous pantomime.  
  
She agrees to follow Jonathan and Martha to their home. She tightens her arms around a squirming Kal and climbs into their vehicle.  
For now. For lack of better options.

With Kal in her arms, Kara sets foot into the Kents' farm for the first time.

There, she and her cousin will remain in the years to come. Safe from the outside world, learning how to be human, learning the language, the history. Growing into their powers under Earth's yellow sun.  
  
Until the day Earth finds itself in world-ending danger and Kara needs to protect her family.  
She won't let them come to harm. Not this time.  
She tells herself that she is going to become the hero her parents wanted her to be, someone for Kal to look up to.  
  
Kara rises her chin and flies toward the sky.

  
**II. Kara arrives on Earth too late**

When her pod lands, Kara finds herself surrounded by armed humans. She hunches her shoulders and looks around with wide eyes. Afraid, not daring to come out of her ship.  
A woman steps away from the group, coming slowly towards Kara. She looks inside the pod and her eyes widen when she sees Kara. No, Kara thinks, when she sees the crest on her tunic.  
The woman motions to the others to fall back.  
Then, she extends a hand in Kara's direction, palm up.  
She speaks to her, her words alien to Kara's ears but her sweet tone comes across.  
She is beautiful. Her dark, luminous hair are held back by a tiara that shines in the sun.  
Kara takes her hand and slowly climbs out the pod's cockpit.

Kara learns that the woman's name is Diana and that she was a friend of her cousin. That her pod had been trapped in the Phantom Zone for nearly two centuries. And that her cousin is dead, has been for years.  
  
Diana tells her that he was a great hero.  
She brings Kara to see the statues erected in his memory all across the world. They all show an imposing figure, the House of El family crest emblazoned on his chest and a cape flying over his shoulders.  
  
Standing in front of one of those statues, Kara breaks out and cries.  
She doesn't cry for her cousin, he lived a long life and didn't need her after all.  
She cries for herself, for the family she lost, the world she lost. She cries because she is alone now and doesn't know what to do. She has no purpose any more.

Diana puts an arm around her shoulder.  
Slowly, she shows her that's not true.  
Diana, who doesn't age like normal humans or even Kryptonians do, who's three thousands years old and fought side by side with her cousin and this world's greatest heroes. Diana, who would be honored to fight by her side one day, who trains her and is her guide in this strange new world. Out of the respect she has for her cousin's memory.

Until, one day, Kara find herself wearing a uniform not unlike the one her cousin is wearing in all those memorials.

She finds that there are still ways for her to honor her family's legacy.

  
**III. Krypton never fell**

Alura wasn't able to stop Astra. No one was.  
And, in turn, Astra's extreme actions weren't enough to save Krypton, victim of its own hubris.  
But the Kryptonians survived the loss of their planet.  
Lead by General Astra, they made again their way to the stars. They found other planets, moons, artificial stations to settle onto before it was too late.  
And if the place they wanted was already occupied, they took it by force.

As expected of her, Kara makes her House proud.  
She grows up to be a magistrate just like her mother (and her grandmother before her), an overseer of their new orbital station, tasked with supervising the Terrans workers. And in a few years, she will join her aunt as a member of the New Council.  
  
One day, Kara falls in love.  
Years after, she has a child.  
In the medical facility of the orbital station, high over the Earth, she and her partner watch their unborn daughter float and kick inside the pseudo-womb.  
Once old enough to chose her own Guild, her daughter will become a jurist too. Or a scientist like uncle Jor-El. Or perhaps she'll join the military like aunt Astra.  
  
It was her right to lead Krypton's people to safety, her aunt had told her. And her duty.  
“The old Council was leading us to our destruction. I couldn't stand by and watch them do nothing. I had to save _you_.”  
Now it's Kara's duty too.  
  
Kara looks outside the view-port, at the blue planet below.  
Here, under the shadows of their new world, there is no danger. No sickness, no pain.  
Here, they are gods.

  
**IV. Kara is the resistance**

Kara gets out of her pod, looking for her cousin's ship.  
Only to find that, somehow, she arrived too late.  
Everywhere, plastered on the walls of the buildings and at the corners of the streets, there are pictures of a dark-haired man with her family's crest on his chest.  
It can only be Kal. Her cousin, grown up without her.  
Kara sticks to the corners of the streets, trying not be noticed. But she sees that people around her are quiet and scared.  
Almost like Kryptonians were, right before the end.  
  
That night, she sees people being rounded up, crying and screaming.  
Then, a fast-flying machine. It drops out of the sky and lands near her.  
Kara tries to run away but she can't, she feels weak, usteady.  
A bald man dressed in white comes out of the aircraft, a sly smile on his lips and a grin gem glowing in his hands.  
Kara remembers the same man, his image moving on the screen, his smile on the pictures. Him, kissing her cousin.  
She screams, dropping on the ground, her whole world reduced to agony. Until, thankfully, she feels no more.  
She comes to to the noise of that strange aircraft. She's lying on her side in an uncomfortable hump, her hands tied behind her back.  
She opens her eyes, just a sliver, not wanting to let her captors know she's awake.  
She sees Earth's strange blue sky. And the ground beneath.  
They're flying.  
Then, a terrible light breaks the sky and Kara feels herself getting thrown around the cockpit. She hits her head.  
  
She must have passed out again.  
When she wakes up, she finds herself trapped in a small glass cage, her manacles gone. Outside the glass, a tall, green-skinned being is looking at her.  
Behind him looms a dark, silent figure, with pointy, animal-like ears over his head.  
_This is the resistance_ , the green man tells her. Sending the thought straight to her head. _And we need your help._  
And: _Are you going to let another planet die? I know I'm not._

That night, Kara cries herself to sleep.  
The morning after, she says yes.  
Kal is her responsibility.

It's a war on two fronts. Kal and Luthor are fighting them but they're also busy counteracting the former prisoners of Fort Rozz, who followed her to Earth.  
It means that they have a chance.

The day of their victory, Kara is standing by the window.  
People across the streets are dancing and celebrating. But she's not looking outside. She's looking at her hands.  
Trying to see the blood she knows is there.  
Suddenly, Kara feels her body tense with a familiar tingle. There's a green glow out of the corner of her eye.  
She turns around.  
The woman, the general's daughter, the one with kind eyes and a dark bob of hair (Lois, she had said, pointing towards herself) is looking at her.  
She has a gun in her hand.  
“I'm sorry”, Lois mouths.  
Kara understands, she is a threat too.  
In her mind, she can still see general Lane's body, lying broken on the ground.  
She could try to run, she's become faster under this alien sun. Still, she hesitates.

She takes a breath, closes her eyes.


	2. ...and one that might have

Kara writes a book.

Well, not at first and not all at once.

It starts with the leather-bound journal Eliza gives her the first week Kara goes to stay with the Danvers.  
“For you, dear,” she says with a kind smile.  
Kara doesn’t understand her yet but she can easily grasp the meaning of her gesture.  
Paper and a mechanical thing to write with. How quaint.  
She fills it with Kryptonian hieroglyphics at first, then stilted English. Such an alien, primitive language.  
She writes of her lost home-world, of her family, of the new things she's learning.  
She writes: I miss you so much, mom.  
And: Why did you leave me alone?

She grows up. She leaves the Danvers' place. She goes away to study.  
She finds her way to National City and her job at CatCo.  
She becomes Supergirl.  
All the while, she never stops keeping journals.  
She finds out, years later, that Eliza meant them as therapy and she can't say they didn't work.  
Except, now that everyone knows about her, a thought starts whirring in her mind.  
She wants to share them. She wants people to know what Krypton was like, what her family was like.  
She wants Clark to know, too. They never really talk much about what has been. And Kara is the only one left to remember it.

She digs up her old journals and she sets up to work, copying and mixing and cutting out all details that are too reveling, about Astra and Fort Rozz's prisoners and the danger they represent. The world already knows she shares a family connection with Superman, they don't need to know more. For her and Clark's own protection.  
  
She spends what seems like years on the project. She sweats, she cries.  
She tries to capture the beauty of Krypton. The red sun and the orange-tinted sky. The buildings made of shining crystals.  
She shares her favorite poems - to be sure she remembers the words right, she consults her mother's hologram.  
She talks about the sound of Kryptonian language.  
She talks about Houses, casts, and Guilds and the structured life of Krypton.  
About the history of Krypton, from the proud warrior society of old to the terribly advanced science and technology and the xenophobia.  
The arrogance, the reckless development that was their downfall, a cautionary tale for the people of Earth.  
She recounts the Tale of the Moon that Was as his father used to tell her, about the scientist who destroyed Krypton's secondary moon and  how space flight came to be banned by the Council after.  
She talks about her uncle Jor-El, the scientist who defied Kryptonian rules and developed the first interstellar propulsion system seen in thousands of year on Krypton, the one used to power her and Clark's ships.  
She talks about her mother Alura, the great jurist, whose guilt was stronger than her need to see her daughter grow up.

And then, she's done.

First, she takes the manuscript to Clark, because she can't publish it without his consent.  
He gives it back to her with tears in his eyes and a smile on his face.  
“ _Thank you_ , Kara,” he says.  
He offers her to help her find a publisher (he offers _Superman's_ help) but she turns him down.  
She has other plans.  
She puts on her suit and goes visit Ms. Grant.

It's morning, the fourth day after the publication date.  
Before rushing to bring coffee to Ms. Grant, Kara checks her phone.  
Memories of Krypton is already on top of most national and international best sellers lists.  
Kara smiles.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Four things that never happened to Kara Zor-El (and one that might have) podfic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10674981) by [endeni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endeni/pseuds/endeni), [Shipsaresinking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shipsaresinking/pseuds/Shipsaresinking)




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